Verizon CEO: We Spent Four Years Trying To Get The iPhone

If you remember, reports had it at the time that Verizon was the carrier Apple originally came to with the iPhone, only to be snubbed by Big Red because of Apple’s insistence on maintaining full control over the phone’s hardware and software: no bundled apps, no carrier branding. Laughing, Apple went to AT&T and history was made.

Speaking to BusinessWeek, Verizon president and CEO Lowell McAdam makes it clear that Verizon regretted that decision pretty much the second after Apple left their offices: he says they’ve spent the last four years trying to get the iPhone back.

You can’t say they weren’t committed. Verizon went so far as to set up dedicated CDMA cell towers on Apple’s Cupertino campus to test reliability, as both Apple and Verizon were keen to avoid AT&T’s coverage issues.

”We probably worked six or nine months on the technical side of this and saw we could make this work,” McAdam revealed, “Then we did the commercial side. The commercial deal took us a day.”

Amusingly, McAdam says that the very concerns over Verizon branding that originally prompted them to rebuff the iPhone are not a concern. “They don’t put a lot of logos on their phones,” McAdam said. ”so that wasn’t a major issue for us.” Yeah. Not now.